The present invention generally relates to remote lecturing systems, and more particularly to a remote lecturing system which enables a student to receive at a station, not in real time, a lecture which is held by a lecturer.
Lecturing systems which use a communication network are becoming popular. For example, a computer-aided learning (CAL) enables a student to receive a lecture which is held by a lecturer via a communication network. However, such lecturing systems require the lecturer and the student to communicate in real time. For this reason, there are demands to realize a remote lecturing system which enables the student to receive the lecture not in real time, that is, at an arbitrary time.
The conventional remote lecturing systems may roughly be divided into two kinds. According to the first kind, the lecture held by the lecturer is transferred to the student in real time, and the student receives the audio and/or visual information of the lecture On the other hand, according to the second kind, the lecturer records the lecture on a video tape recorder (VTR) or the like, and the student later makes access to the recorded lecture at an arbitrary time.
However, according to the first kind of remote lecturing system, both the lecturer and the student must avail themselves at the same time. For this reason, this remote lecturing system lacks flexibility in that the time and day of the lecture must be determined to suit the schedules of all persons concerned, that is, the lecturer and all of the students.
On the other hand, according to the second kind of remote lecturing system, the lecturer simply needs to record the lecture, and each student can make access to the recorded lecture at an arbitrary time. Hence, the lecturer and the students have no need to make a mutually convenient time for the lecture. But since the lecture is prerecorded, there is a problem in that the student cannot obtain an answer to his question when he receives the lecture. Usually, the student will have difficulty understanding the rest of the lecture when his questions are unanswered. Therefore, the fact that the student cannot obtain an answer to his question is a big problem to the remote lecturing system.